The chambers of rhetoric in the Low Countries were amateur guilds or confraternities of laymen especially devoted to the composition of vernacular poetry and drama. The members were trained to perform not only in the semiprivate sphere of their chambers, but also in the public sphere, often in the context of civic festivals. This article asks if women had access to this formal literary culture that flourished in the urban middle class milieu of the Low Countries during the early modern period.

Mary, Queen of Scots promised to make a parliamentary religious settlement when she returned, as a Catholic, to her newly Protestant realm of Scotland in 1561. She then delayed summoning a parliament until 1563, and the summons, when it came, was engineered by her leading Protestant adviser, the earl of Moray. However, when parliament assembled, Mary outmaneuvered Moray with a series of well-timed concessions, and successfully avoided a Protestant settlement. The whole issue was a crucial one for Mary’s personal reign, and it illustrates her skill in rallying broad support.

Sixteenth century Lutheran funeral sermons were intended for both clerical and popular audiences and sought to instruct and console the grieving. Unlike the Lutherans, the Reformed rejected most funeral ceremonial, including the preaching of funeral sermons. The collection of funeral sermons by the Reformed pastor Johann Brandmüller is unique in applying the Reformed style of published sermons, intended primarily as a theological resource for pastors, to a distinctively Lutheran genre.

The chambers of rhetoric in the Low Countries were amateur guilds or confraternities of laymen especially devoted to the composition of vernacular poetry and drama. The members were trained to perform not only in the semiprivate sphere of their chambers, but also in the public sphere, often in the context of civic festivals. This article asks if women had access to this formal literary culture that flourished in the urban middle class milieu of the Low Countries during the early modern period.

The precedence controversy refers to the dispute between the dukes of Ferrara and the dukes of Florence over who had precedence at ceremonials, especially those held at the papal court, over the last half of the sixteenth century. The controversy has been largely undervalued as the product of mere princely egotism, especially of Alfonso II d’Este and Cosimo I de’ Médici, linked to the decline of Italy, especially its small states, and within a process of refeudalization.

From earliest times, controversies abounded about the Blessed Virgin Mary, her Immaculate Conception or capacity for sin, and other issues. These controversies achieved particular intensity and expression in a debate about the Mater Dolorosa, the “sorrowful mother” at the foot of the Cross, a debate that began with the patristic writers and came to intense new life in early modern English polemic. Like many before, Edmund Bunny argued that Mary’s grief demonstrated culpable doubt in the divinity of her son.